Why There’s No Manual in the U.S.-Market Audi A3/S3—And Why It’s Not Time to Despair

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“All engines are mated to the standard 6-speed S tronic transmission,” Audi buries in the press release for the new A3 and S3 sedans, before going on to plug that S tronic gearbox for its dynamism and smoothness. Reading this in the Car and Driver offices, hearts sunk. Torches were lit. Pitchforks brandished. If there was a town square, we’d have flooded it—along with a hay-wagon’s worth of people for whom “no stick, no buy” is a fifth gospel.

At the reveal event for the A3, held in New York the night before the auto show opened to the press, we grabbed an affable Audi exec to talk about this grave gear-changing oversight. “There’s no business case for it,” he said, smothering our faint hopes of a stick making an appearance in a yet-to-be-announced gasoline version of the A3 hatchback. The best chance for the A3, we learned, had been the hot 300-hp S3. “We lobbied hard for a stick in the S3,” the exec said, “but in the end the numbers just didn’t add up.”

We’ve heard the business-case line before, and it’s really not just a line in some pejorative “get-off-my-case” way. The fact is, even something as simple as offering a manual transmission requires EPA and other government certification—and it costs millions of dollars. (Plugging in diesel engines is way more costly—and we are getting one of those for the A3, after all.) Beyond that, dealers become hesitant to take cars with manual gearboxes into inventory, fearing that they’ll sit for months, unsellable, and that no fanatical stick shoppers will happen to darken the doorway. Delivering the enthusiast requests becomes a balancing act: Audi gave us the Audi TT RS without so much as the option of an automatic transmission, because that’s a car purely for car geeks—and rich ones, at that—but other times, the stick is a feature too far.

Automakers Are Listening, Though

Audi’s internal debate on the A3 is typical for the wider auto industry. The number of manual-transmission devotees is not insignificant, and the degree of passion among them is extreme. To wit: A reader e-mailed to tell us about his new petition on Change.org, which demands a stick from Audi in the A3 sedan. Other automakers have responded to public cries in the recent past. Hearing demand from California, Ford began offering the top-trim Titanium model of the Focus with a manual, an inexpensive move, since no new regulatory work had to be done. Kia, too, got the message that people wanted three pedals in nicely equipped Rio SXs, and built 400 to meet demand. That’s a tiny run of cars—again, not expensive, since a manual was already certified for the econobox-spec Rio—but it underscores Kia’s interest in placating the nutters among us. On the other hand, Infiniti just killed the stick option for the G37-cum-Q50, telling us this week that nobody was buying them.

Hearing the Kia and Ford stories does raise questions about why Audi won’t just, well, give in. Isn’t the brand image worth the investment? There’s probably a spreadsheet, buried on a computer alongside another file with paint-color survey results, that quantifies the potential fandom in dollars and cents, and concludes that the goodwill of offering a stick-shift A3 is still too pricey.

Like the recent rise in popularity for straight razors, grass-fed beef, or small-batch bourbon, the intensity and spread of enthusiasm for manual transmissions in part signals appreciation for old-school, “I’ll do it my damn self” thinking. BMW offers a manual in the M5 and M6 only in the U.S. solely because American purists demanded it do so. Read Audi’s decision on the A3 as a reason to keep up the fight—they did hear us, it just didn’t work this time. Because we enthusiast are not just saving the manuals, we’re pumping in new life.